Lesson 3: Liberty

“Big data is watching you”

We like to think that we have free will and that our decisions are logical. But scientists long ago discovered, that our decisions are emotional. We make a decision based on our intuition and feelings, and later we add a logical narrative.

In the future, algorithms will know us much better than we know ourselves. Algorithms, together with devices that will analyze human bodies (such as biosensors), will be able to read us very well. They already know what road we should take (Google Maps), or what movie we should watch (Netflix). But the future is more than this. They will know better than us what we should study, who we should marry, and what job we should take. They will analyze our emotions, our personality, they will understand what makes us excited and what we don’t like. Based on all this information, AI will be able to make decisions for us. This includes the political ones.

So, despite having free will, we will be more and more dependent on algorithms. We will trust them more, so at the end of the day, our future will depend on them. Not on our own judgment, but on AI.

Hollywood movies taught us, that in the future, there might be intelligent robots, that will gain consciousness and destroy humanity. The truth is, that intelligence may work completely independently from the consciousness. It seems that we will have super-intelligent computers helping humanity in pretty much every area of life. But the biggest danger is not in creating an AI that is conscious. The danger is in people that will use these computers to rule the world. AI will be as evil as the creator.